Christians and big-time sports: It’s more than ‘Sportianity’
This essay is a Preview, an occasional feature at Current and a companion to our Review features. In Previews we publish short excerpts from new and upcoming books that tell a good story and fit our general mission of commentary, reflection, judgment. This essay has been adapted with permission from the publisher from The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports. Oxford University Press, 2024. 280 pp., $29.99
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The videos made the rounds on social media in August. On the Ohio State campus, a group of students was singing and praying, arms raised and faces skyward. They were listening to testimonies as fellow students described the change Jesus had made in their lives. As night fell, dozens decided they wanted that change, too; they were baptized in tanks of water set up in the campus square.
Online, Christian influencers celebrated and cheered. But it was not just the moving scenes that captured people’s attention. A key part of the event’s reach came because of its connection with the storied Ohio State football team. The gathering was led and organized by Kamryn Babb, a former Buckeyes receiver. A promotional ad, posted by Babb, featured seven current players in full uniform, with language describing the event as “Fall Kickoff: An Invitation to Jesus.”
Sports Spectrum, a publication that covers the connections between sports and evangelical Christianity, described the event and its aftermath. “God has brought together a number of devout followers of Christ on the Ohio State football team, and He’s already borne astounding spiritual fruit,” Kevin Mercer summarized. “It appears as though God has brought a revival on the football team that’s spreading throughout Columbus and beyond.”
Whether this event is part of a larger revival movement spreading across the country, I’ll leave for others to decide. What I can say is that it fits within a much larger historical trajectory.
In my book The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports, I describe and trace that trajectory. I explain why and how sports become a bastion of evangelical Christianity, and I explore how that development has shaped the sports industry, the landscape of American Christianity, and American culture at large.
I show, in other words, that the sight of college football players leading a revival should not be a surprise at all. We should see it instead as the product of decades of work by sports ministry organizations and leaders to create a subculture and a movement within sports where evangelical expressions of faith are prioritized and shared.
Historians who write about the blending of sports and Christianity in America often focus on a movement called “muscular Christianity.” In its American form, this movement emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, aiming to counter the supposed feminization of the Protestant church by presenting a more masculine image, one fit for the “strenuous” age of American expansion.
Athletics became an important part of the movement, helping attract men to church and mold them into rugged Christian leaders. It was in part through the muscular Christian movement that Protestants overcame their suspicion of games and recreation and embraced football, baseball, and the newly invented basketball as wholesome—and holy—endeavors.
According to the typical historical narrative, muscular Christianity began to fade after World War I, popping up periodically whenever a new Christian athlete or coach receives widespread publicity (e.g. Bill McCartney and Promise Keepers in the 1990s, or Tebowmania circa 2010). In The Spirit of the Game, however, I argue that muscular Christianity did not disappear. Instead, I suggest that the 1920s are critical for understanding how American Protestants both carried forward and reshaped muscular Christian approaches to sports.
It was during this decade that Protestants were forced to confront a crucial reality: They would not be able to shape sports in their own image, as the earlier generation of muscular Christians had hoped to do. If they wanted to maintain a place within the commercialized world of big-time sports while also upholding the moral and spiritual value of athletics—the “spirit of the game”—they would need to accommodate and adapt.
My book details how a group of Protestant men (and women, after the 1970s) accomplished this task and built a lasting movement. In the midst of the cultural changes of the 1920s, they transformed muscular Christianity, reframing commercialized sports as a form of middlebrow culture through which they could promote a vision for American society rooted in “traditional” values like self-discipline, industriousness, and personal faith while also incorporating supposedly “modern” twentieth-century values of consumerism, cooperation, and pluralism.
After forging and maintaining links between Protestant religion and big-time sports in the 1920s, they began to organize after World War II, launching new institutions—the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Athletes in Action, Pro Athletes Outreach, and Baseball Chapel—that brought structure and meaning to the diffuse community of Christian athletes. By the 1970s this growing movement had enmeshed itself within the sports industry, forming an evangelical sports subculture that I call the “Christian athlete movement.” (Sports Illustrated’s legendary Frank DeFord, on the other hand, dubbed it “Sportianity.”)
In one sense, it is remarkable how much this subculture has achieved. A strong case can be made that there is no public workplace or industry in American culture today with a greater concentration of organized and committed Christians than big-time sports. While many sectors of American public life, including education and entertainment, have tended to move in a more secular direction, in sports the opposite is true. Compared with one hundred years ago, there are far more athletes and coaches today willing to publicly champion Christianity as a formative influence in their lives.
In another sense, however, the success of the Christian athlete movement remains tenuous. Unlike other forms of evangelical popular culture—such as music, books, and movies—evangelicals cannot simply create their own big-time sports leagues. The pluralistic nature of the sports industry means that evangelicals have to participate within an organizational infrastructure whose boundaries and priorities they do not dictate. Accommodation is required, and accommodation is sometimes anathema to the increasingly zero-sum culture war approach that is common in our day.
This need to fit within a pluralistic space means that the Christian athlete movement is marked by both power (the ability to define and set the terms for what it means to be a Christian in sports) and precarity (access to big-time sports that is never secure). It is a central paradox that looms over the past, present, and future of the movement.
Along with this paradox of power and precarity, there is another point of tension woven throughout my book: the balance between the personal/practical application of faith and its broader political and cultural implications.
Throughout The Spirit of the Game I emphasize the significance of the mundane and the ordinary. For most Christian athletes and coaches, evangelical sports ministries were and are helpful primarily because they provide guidance for everyday living. They offer religious resources to meet the practical concerns of the sports world: how to build and sustain healthy marriages; how to navigate injuries and setbacks; how to achieve peak performance; how to steward finances; how to handle the pressures and anxiety of being an athlete.
At that same time, those personal applications of faith must be situated within a larger cultural and political context. Upholding the moral and spiritual value and meaning of big-time sports—defending the “spirit of the game”—may have meant different things to different people, but it was rarely a politically or culturally neutral act. I show how it was often entwined with visions for an American society in which Protestant coaches, athletes, and sports ministers saw themselves as men in the arena, carefully and cautiously guiding the United States into the future while preserving the so-called traditional values of their imagined Protestant past.
When I see events like the Ohio State football revival, I see an example of these tensions at play, and also evidence of the lasting influence of the Christian athlete movement in American culture. It is a remarkable trajectory. The rise of big-time sports once seemed to threaten Christianity’s influence, creating a rival for the time and attention of Americans. By carving out a home within this world, the leaders of the Christian athlete movement turned that threat into a vehicle for maintaining their influence in a secularizing American society.
In The Spirit of the Game, I try to explain how it happened—and, in the process, what sports can tell us about transformations in American Protestantism over the last 100 years.
Paul Putz is director of the Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor’s Truett Seminary.